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You Are 52 And Worried About Keeping Your/Looking for a Job

I was re-reading a business book
that was published in 1991.It had
success stories of companies that had installed new management techniques.(The author, of course, was an expert on
those techniques.)Many of those
companies no longer exist. Not because
of following the writer’s recommendations – those are actually pretty good even
today. But because of the earth-shattering changes that have swept U.S. and the
world- of industry.

You – our model worker- just
recently celebrated your fifty –second birthday. You were part of a wave of baby –boomer women
who swept into colleges and universities in the seventies and eighties and
graduated in 1984. Or perhaps it is you
– the man who completed military service at that same time.You entered the work force in 1984.

Think about just how much things
have changed since then.Tools you
learned to use only to discard and replace them with something newer and
better.When you started working, PCs
and Macs were just becoming deployed in the workplace on a widespread
basis.You learned WordPerfect, Lotus
123 and Harvard Graphics to take advantage of the new computer power on your
desk.You needed to, because, as famed Professor
Lester Thurow explained, Japanese companies were crushing U.S. companies and
your future earnings and advancement were being diminished as a result. Mr.
Thurow certainly had my attention.Despite noteworthy skills and an industrious workforce, the Japanese
didn’t destroy us economically after all.(Thurow it turns out underestimated the microprocessor).

You learned Management by
Objectives, and maybe had to employ Zero-based Budgeting, at least for a while.

Peters and Waterman ushered in the
age of big-selling business books with The Search for Excellence, which
you studied carefully. If your employer was on the cutting edge, and had
learned to fear and covet Japanese productivity, it trained you on Just-in-Time
manufacturing, quality circles and quality control (QC) methods.

By the late eighties, some of your
more successful friends were getting phones installed in their cars, but the
equipment took up a big space in their car trunk, and they complained about the
size of their monthly bills.Others
purchased suitcase-sized portable computers from firms like Kaypro and Compaq.Prices for fast PCs fell to around $2,000.

You learned all new productivity
programs as Microsoft swept Lotus, WordPerfect and Harvard Graphics right off
the playing field.But that was OK;
you’re competitive and you aren’t going to be left behind.Mobile phone prices dropped to the point that
you were willing to buy one, and purchased a Nokia candy-bar shaped phone.It could hold twenty numbers in memory!Making calls was as easy as using your home
phone, but there were lots of places where you couldn’t get on a network.You learned to watch for a network signal,
because “roaming” charges were budget-busters. You had mastered expense control.

You learned all the Seven
Habits of Highly Successful People .Actually, you practice most of them to this day.

Your boss’s boss’s boss read
Michael Hammer’s Reengineering the Corporation, and suddenly your work
life was chaos.Your employer had to
reengineer everything.Some of the
changes actually worked, as cheap computer power was harnessed to do work differently
and more effectively.But you watched as
it spread throughout corporate America, and reengineering just became a code
word for layoffs. Far too often it wasn’t doing work more effectively at
all.To this day you can spot a process
that is a mess and size it up with a glance and determine if it is a candidate
for process improvement or the more complex reengineering effort.

You realized that you needed to
learn more about the “Internet” and ended up opening an AOL account.It wasn’t too clear what you could do with
it, but the little ping and “You’ve got mail” became addictive-at least at
first.Your shelf of business books grew
with William Ouchi’s Theory Z as your company decided that if it
couldn’t manage culture, it could at least influence it. With every new version
of Windows and Office you acquired – and really used - Windows for Dummies, not
to mention the documentation that came with each PC you purchased.You missed investing in Netscape, but you
definitely noticed it, and sensed something different was indeed happening.You bought a Palm Pilot and learned its
little characters.However, you kept
losing or breaking the stylus and you quietly questioned whether it wasn’t just
better and faster to write in a journal.

Your employer concluded that it
must be number one or number two in every market it served.You concluded that defining a market was far
more art than science, and that a surprising number of companies convinced themselves
that they were finishing first or second in some market.

Suddenly things seemed to move
faster, and the requirement to both be in the office more and be available for
email and calls in your “off” hours increased.Consultants started saying that your employer needed to move at Internet
speed or be left behind forever.On the
personal side, you noticed that the once-wimpy young auditors that showed up in
your office were suddenly not wimpy at all, but clearly pumping iron in the
gym.And the lowly programmers suddenly
commanded premium wages – even older ones – actually particularly the older
ones who knew Fortran and Assembler and Cobol as rumors of software problems
associated with Y2K circulated.

A few of your friends quit their
jobs and became daytraders.Not too long
thereafter they bought Mercedes and Rolexes.Later they learned about pawn shops and crushing reality of lease payments
when the Internet bubble burst.You saw
the value of your carefully built 401(k) drop by 40% and your planned retirement
date recede into the future.

You’ve changed jobs, and your
employers have changed owners, and you survived and even thrived as you worked
with software from Sage and Lawson and Oracle and Great Plains and SAP and
SAS.Not to mention specialized
applications in your field.

“Blackberries” started sprouting
on the belt of every successful person you knew.Checking email continuously became de rigueur.You are now a master of the taps, clicks and
swipes necessary to exploit the super-computer in your pocket.

More recently you’ve been
introduced to Workday, Wordpress and Salesforce.

You’ve been downsized and laid-off
and outsourced, but have survived them all.

You watched as your employer
struggled with old advertising and promotion approaches while upstarts took
customers away using Google Ad Words, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and
Pinterest.In response, you learned
something about SEO and SEM.Seth Godin
taught you Permission Marketingwhile
Charlene Li was informing you about all things social in Groundswell and Jonah Berger explained how to make ideas Contagious.

You’ve seen a lot. You’ve learned
a lot. You can take a punch and get up. You’ve learned a lot about human
nature.You’ve reported to mature folks,
and to a kid that probably didn’t need to shave. You don’t panic. You can do
stuff, and a lot of it.

Yes, there are kids who can surf
the net faster, and think they can multi-task (although new science shows that they
make a lot of mistakes and do a third rate job when they do).But you also learned the 10,000 hour rule,
and those hours are in your rear view mirror.

When the NY Knicks needed a new basketball executive, they turned to 68
year old Phil Jackson.Warren Buffet, at
87, is still considered the greatest investor of all time.Sixty-six year old Hillary Rodham Clinton is
poised to run for the President of the United States. If she does, she’ll be 68
when the election comes up. When people want something done, and done well,
they look for someone with deep experience.

That’s you isn’t it?

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About Me

Grew up in Memphis, worked my way through the local university, married my high school sweetheart - still married 42 years later. Played in a rock band, couldn't make a living, became a CPA. Raised two great sons. Moved all over the U.S. with different finance and management jobs. Now working with multiple start-ups as an investor and advisor.